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EnglishCentral and Tosho Group Establish an EdTech Joint Venture in Japan

EnglishCentral and Tosho Group Establish an EdTech Joint Venture in Japan

Tokyo, Japan – October 26, 2021.
EnglishCentral today announced a joint venture to develop and distribute English language learning solutions for the school market in Japan with Tosho Printing Co., Ltd (”Tosho”). Tosho is a subsidiary of the Toppan Group, one of Japan’s leading publishing and printing companies with more than $13 billion in annual revenue and more than 52,000 employees.

As part of the joint venture, Tosho educational group and EnglishCentral will establish a venture dedicated to providing services for the K-12 and University school market in Japan. The venture will operate under the EnglishCentral brand and will focus on the K-12 and university students that Tosho touches every year, targeting 1 million students.

EnglishCentral’s IntelliSpeech℠ platform will be at the core of the venture. IntelliSpeech℠ uses AI-powered interactive exercises to help students develop their spoken English by given them instant feedback on their pronunciation and fluency. The IntelliSpeech℠ platform is already bundled with Kirihara’s most successful government approved Textbooks, Pro-Vision, WorldTrek and Empower. The goal of the venture is not only to expand the number of titles and reach of IntelliSpeech℠ but also to create a whole new set of products based on AI-powered chatbots that can effectively both train and assess students’ true communicative ability.

“EnglishCentral is proud to play a key role in Tosho’s digital transformation strategy, “‘ stated Hirofumi Matsumura, the General Manager of EnglishCentral Japan. “I am delighted to expand our partnership with Tosho to accelerate adoption of IntelliSpeech℠ into the K-12 market. The demand for EnglishCentral’s English speaking solutions has been exploding and we are delighted to have a partner with the size and reach of Tosho to help us dramatically expand our footprint in the Japan school market. With the support of Tosho in this new venture, we will exponentially increase our sales and support coverage for the school market in Japan, with seven local branches covering each region of Japan. I’m delighted to be leading this new venture,” he added.

“We are very impressed by how EnglishCentral is applying the latest in AI-powered learning and assessment technologies to the English learning products,” stated Seiji Yano, Senior Managing Director at Tosho. There is still a long way to go to bring the speaking level of Japanese K-12 and university students to compete effectively in the global marketplace. Through this new venture, we are proud to offer new, innovative solutions to Japanese students to help improve their spoken English.”

About EnglishCentral:

EnglishCentral is the most widely adopted AI-powered English language conversation platform in the world, changing the way students and professionals across the globe learn to speak English. Adopted by over 1000 universities, schools and corporations in over 100 countries, the company delivers interactive, video-based language learning experiences for both self-study and one-on-one tutoring, providing one of the most widely adopted and complete platforms for practicing and mastering English conversation online. Its extensive library of video lessons, proprietary IntelliSpeech℠ speech assessment technology, and pre-built course modules guarantee results for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners.

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EnglishCentral Launches New Pronunciation Center

EnglishCentral Launches New Pronunciation Center

New Machine Learning Techniques Double Precision for Learners

September 9, 2021. Boston, MA. EnglishCentral today released its new Pronunciation Center, the industry’s first online English pronunciation tool trained on over 1 billion learner events.

For the last 10 years, our learners have provided us over 1 billion learning events on how they learn English, said Alan Schwartz, Founder & CEO of EnglishCentral. We have used this data to create what we call a “Teacher-Machine Learning Loop” that leverages our team of over 600 trained professional English teachers to train and improve our IntelliSpeechSM machine learning platform.

The new Pron Center, powered by IntelliSpeechSM, more than doubles the accuracy in detecting errors in learners’ pronunciation and fluency compared to previous versions. The goal with AI-feedback on EnglishCentral is to emulate what great teachers do. For example, instead of pointing out each and every pronunciation mistake a student makes, a great teacher focuses on just those egregious mistakes that make the students speech unintelligible. This is key to maintain students’ motivation to keep practicing. The 2x increase in accuracy in our latest version is specifically related to reducing “false alerts”, i.e., penalizing learners for mistakes that are in fact not mistakes that matter for intelligibility.

“EnglishCentral has led the market here for English pronunciation training for almost a decade now,” said Dr. Charles Browne, PhD at Meiji Gakuin University, and developer of the New General Service List (NGSL), a popular high-frequency vocabulary list used worldwide. “In addition to the accuracy improvements with this latest Pron Center, the tight integration with high-frequency vocabulary lists means learners can focus their speaking practice on just those words that matter the most. EnglishCentral is the only vocab tool on the market I am aware of that allows students to systematically practice speaking high frequency words in context,” added Dr. Browne.

The Pronunciation Center is currently available on the desktop and mobile version of the EnglishCentral website. It will be available on Android and iOS apps later this year.

Press Contact:
Shun Furuyama, Marketing Director, press@englishcentral.com, Phone: +815038023236

566 468 EC blogger

AI Expert Steven Chambers to Join EnglishCentral Advisory Board

AI Expert Steven Chambers to Join EnglishCentral Advisory Board


May 15, 2020. Boston, MA. EnglishCentral, the most widely adopted AI-powered English language conversation platform in the world, today announced that Steven Chambers will join as a strategic advisor.

Mr. Chambers is a recognized leader in artificial intelligence and speech recognition, having served as President at Nuance Communications, the world’s leading speech recognition company, and as CMO of Sense, Inc., named by VentureBeat in 2019 as one of the world’s top 100 artificial intelligence companies.

“Steve’s background in AI is super helpful to us at this stage in our corporate life given his leadership of both entrepreneurial and multi-billion dollar organizations at scale”, said Alan Schwartz, CEO of EnglishCentral. “Additionally, Steve’s recent focus exploring the nexus of innovation and educational pedagogies via his PhD candidacy at the Harvard School of Education fits directly in with our key mission: how best to combine recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence to support better teaching and better outcomes for learners. With industry-leaders like Steve and Mike Phillips, CEO of Sense, on our team, I am confident we are on the right path to build the industry’s leading solutions combining live teaching and artificial intelligence into what we call our Teacher-Machine Learning Loop.”

About EnglishCentral:

EnglishCentral is the most widely adopted AI-powered English language conversation platform in the world, changing the way students and professionals across the globe learn to speak English. Adopted by over 1000 universities, schools and corporations in over 100 countries, the company delivers interactive, video-based language learning experiences for both self-study and one-on-one tutoring, providing one of the most widely adopted and complete platforms for practicing and mastering English conversation online. Its extensive library of video lessons, proprietary IntelliSpeech℠ speech assessment technology, and pre-built course modules guarantee results for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners.

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Meet the New EnglishCentral

Meet New EnglishCentral

The latest version of EnglishCentral is now live!

We are proud to announce the latest version of EnglishCentral is now available in 10 languages. It’s a ground-up rewrite of our platform using the latest progressive web technology, built by our teams in Boston, Ankara, Tokyo, Seoul, and Manila.

And, we are just getting started… We have a new version of our IntelliSpeechSM assessment platform on the way next quarter too. To help us continue to innovate further in applying the latest technologies to language learning, we are hiring speech science engineers, mobile UX developers as well as great ELL teachers and linguists. If interested, please reach out at careers@englishcentral.com.

See What’s New!

My Feed

Get course, video, and vocabulary study recommendations that match your interests and level.

Weekly Progress

Set daily goals and earn “streaks” when you study every day.

Overall Progress

Track your progress and what’s required to reach the next level on EnglishCentral.

Discover the New EnglishCentral

Try the new design and features and let us know (contact us) what you think.

Happy learning

The EnglishCentral Team

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EnglishCentral IntelliSpeech℠ Technology

EnglishCentral IntelliSpeech℠ Technology

EnglishCentral’s “special sauce” has always been our internally developed IntelliSpeech℠ assessment technology. Teachers appreciate how IntelliSpeech℠ motivates students to speak outside of the classroom. Students appreciate the instant feedback and the game dynamic of trying to improve their speaking scores.

EnglishCentral’s IntelliSpeech℠ is trained on hundreds of millions of lines of speech from students from over 100 countries, using the latest Machine Learning techniques. It assesses learners’ speaking ability across the following dimensions:

Pronunciation measures the acoustical qualities of students’ speech over 64,000 possible triphones (combinations of phonemes), stress and prosodics. 

Fluency is still based on duration and pause rate of the speech.

Completion is still based on whether the user speaks all words, or drops words.

Error Types

As the learner speaks, Intellispeech℠  provides feedback according to the following types of errors:

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Line Score

Learners get a line score between 0 and 100 points for each line spoken. Learners lose points for each error made. The amount of points learners lose per error is weighted based on the number of words in the line. For shorter lines, learners lose more points per error than for longer lines.

Only the final version of each line spoken counts towards the users final score on the Video Grade. So, if a line is repeated several times, only the last version counts towards the Video Grade.

Video Grades

The video grade is the cumulative measure (i.e. the weighted average) of the line scores received by the learner from speaking lines in the video.

Intellispeech℠ computes a percentile relative to other learners to produce a video grade. For instance, if we determine that the speech for the video was 75% better than other learners, the learner would get a “B+” as a video grade.

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Percentiles are mapped to grades as follows:

Pronunciation Center

The Pronunciation Center (“Pron Center”) on EnglishCental is where students’ feedback and progress on their pronunciation is tracked and where they can find exercises to help remediate their pronunciation challenges.

At the heart of the Pron Center are the 4 steps of our Pronunciation Learning Cycle:

  1. Speak Anywhere on EC

    2. The Pron Center automatically collects all words students have trouble pronouncing during any speaking activity on EnglishCentral, such as speaking lines in our interactive video player, or speaking words in our Vocab Builder.

  2. Pron Center Collects Weak Words

    3. Students then use the Pron Center to focus on their weak words, either focusing on their weakest words, or their weakest Phonemes.

  3. Practice with Courses & Tutors

    4. To help learn how to form Sounds correctly, students follow one of EnglishCentral’s pronunciation courses, or take a GoLive! lesson, 1-on-1 with a tutor and get feedback on their pronunciation and fluency.

  4. Master the Sounds

    5. The Pron Center tracks student’s progress on each word, and automatically removes the word from study when students successfully speak the word 3 times in a row anywhere in the site.

Pronunciation Courses

IntelliSpeech℠ has analyzed our users English pronunciation over hundreds of millions of recorded utterances and identified the most common problematic sounds of speakers for each native language region. Based on this analysis and speech data, we have designed pronunciation courses — Top 10 Challenges — where learners can focus on the most challenging Sounds for speakers from their native language, using authentic videos. We currently have customized pronunciation courses for: Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, French, Vietnamese, and Arabic.

pron course

Our Speech Database

For the last 10 years, our learners have provided us a trove of data (over 600,000,000 speech utterances from over 100 countries) on how they learn English.

Our reference models are also training on large amounts of data collected from native speakers speaking the authentic speech from our videos (as opposed to many other corpora which may contain artificial “read speech”).

We use this data to create a “Machine Learning Loop” that combines this large data set with feedback from a team of over 600 trained professional English teachers who have analyzed student speaking ability in over 500,000 1-on-1 live sessions. The result is the “machine” (our online self-study platform) learns from the feedback teachers provide, and at the same time, teachers learn from the feedback the machine provides on learners’ strengths and weaknesses.

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EnglishCentral Opens New R and D Center in METU Technopark

EnglishCentral Opens New R and D Center in METU Technopark
Grand Opening Includes President Erdoğan

Ankara, Turkey – February 18, 2019 – EnglishCentral, the leading provider of online English conversation solutions, today announced the grand opening of an R&D center in Ankara, Turkey. EnglishCentral joined President Erdoğan of Turkey as part of the grand opening of the METU Technopark, IT & Innovation Center, a newly designated high-tech R&D Center in central Ankara.

At the heart of the Center is Middle East Technical University (METU), the leading technical university in Turkey. As President Erdoğan articulated at the grand opening, “the idea of the Center is to form a close collaboration between the university and industry, powered by the world’s leading technology companies that bring an innovative spirit to the technopark”.

EnglishCentral is proud to be one of the founding tenants in the new technopark, along with other technology leaders such as Samsung, Tüpraş, the largest energy company in Turkey, and Onedio, the premier social media site in Turkey.

The EnglishCentral team, located in the technopark, now consists of 30 members, and will serve as one of the key R&D centers for EnglishCentral globally, focusing on machine learning and speech recognition, the two technologies behind our proprietary speech assessment system called IntelliSpeech℠.

“We have been incredibly impressed by the level of talent we’ve been able to hire at our tech center in Turkey,” said Alan Schwartz, CEO of EnglishCentral, Inc. “We are hiring top talent out of METU, Bilkent and other universities, and the team there is now working on our most challenging projects to serve our customers in Turkey as well as globally in Japan and other countries.

“Our plan is to use Turkey as our base to expand to both toward Europe and towards the Middle East”, said Kağan Cihangiroğlu, EnglishCentral’s General Manager for Turkey & the Middle East. “In addition to technical talent, we have teamed with up with a number of the leading universities in Turkey to develop English language learning curriculum that leverages our strengths in Speaking Assessment, and Adaptive Learning.”

For a tour of our new office in Metu Technopark, check out this video:

About EnglishCentral:
EnglishCentral is the most widely adopted online English language conversation platform in the world, changing the way students and professionals across the globe learn to speak English. Adopted by over 500 universities, schools and corporations in over 100 countries, the company delivers interactive, video-based language learning experiences for both self-study and one-on-one tutoring, providing one of the most widely adopted and complete platforms for practicing and mastering English conversation online. Its extensive library of videos lessons, proprietary IntelliSpeech℠ speech assessment technology, and pre-built course modules guarantee results for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. EnglishCentral entered the Turkish market in 2011, and now has over 500,000 registered users in Turkey. In addition, EnglishCentral has established partnerships with many of the leading universities and companies in Turkey, including, Bahçeşehir University, TOBB University, Bilkent University, Bilgi University, Turkish Airlines, Şişecam, Turkish Ground Services, and many more.
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EnglishCentral Contact:
Kağan Cihangiroğlu
General Manager for Turkey & the Middle East
Phone: +903122405045
Email: kagan.cihangiroglu@englishcentral.com

500 375 EC blogger

Teacher Tools: Setting Goals & Tracking Student Progress

Teacher Tools: Setting Goals & Tracking Student Progress


Please use this post as a guide as you create your syllabus and use our teacher tools to set goals for students and track their progress through our reports:

%e3%82%b9%e3%82%af%e3%83%aa%e3%83%bc%e3%83%b3%e3%82%b7%e3%83%a7%e3%83%83%e3%83%88-2017-03-01-15-14-51Learn/Quiz Progress

Students get “Learn Progress” for any word they successfully complete in learn mode or in a vocab quiz. This allows teachers to set word study goals that cover both the word typing cloze activity in Learning Mode as well as the definition matching quiz in Quiz Mode.

Because our hope is to help students retain knowledge of the words they are studying in their long-term memory, Time Interval Learning in MyWords will continue to drive how words are studied on EnglishCentral. Students can make progress on words only after the applicable time interval has elapsed.

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Therefore, Time Interval Learning constraints prevents a student, for instance, from getting credit for studying the same word five times in one day. On the other hand, it does give students credit for learning the same word after the applicable time interval has lapsed. In this way, the system encourages review and multiple exposure to words.

 

Speak Progress

Speak Lines

In March 2017, we settled on Spoken Lines as the key metric for setting speaking goals and measuring student’s speaking progress.  We count only unique lines, so while students are encouraged to speak lines multiple times to improve their video speaking grade, only the final instance of the line will be counted towards their line goal. We recommend setting a goal of 50 lines per week (this is now the default), which is equivalent to approximately one hour of study time. You can, of course, increase or decrease the number of lines for the goal, depending on the needs of your students or your curriculum.

Speaking Grades

To assessing student’s speaking ability, rather than just quanity of student’s speaking output, we recommend teachers use Speaking Grades (A to F).    Teachers can see grades for a single video or across all final lines spoken by the student over any defined period of time.  Note, we count only the last attempt the student made on a line towards the calculated overall grade

GoLive Tutoring

Teachers that are using our Premium GoLive! Product that include 1:1 tutoring (“GoLive!) can now set goals for numbers of tutor sessions in the Teacher Tools.  Note this only applies to teachers who are using our Premium Product (see Plans for more details). For most teachers using our Academic Product, they will not see any setting for GoLive! in the goal setting interface.

Mobile Access

Student progress is now fully available on their Android or IOS mobile devices.    Students can see their progress on their “My Classes” home from the main menu on their apps.

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Turn your School’s Existing Curriculum into an EnglishCentral Custom Course

Turn your School’s Existing Curriculum into an EnglishCentral Custom Course

EnglishCentral can adapt your existing curriculum to blend with the EnglishCentral platform, giving your students speaking and vocabulary practice from their mobile devices as well as from the web. This means you can adopt EnglishCentral for your current classes, without changing your textbook or other materials.

custom

custom-course

To do this, we create custom courses for you from our library of over 14,000 videos lessons.  Each lesson is enabled with close activities, vocabulary quizzes, and interactive speaking practice using our IntelliSpeechTM speech assessment system.   These custom courses map to the level and scope and sequence of your current curriculum.  Courses also have custom wordlists students can study in our quiz app on web or on mobile.

Contact us for a Case Study on how Kyoto Sangyo adopted EnglishCentral custom curriculum for web and mobile, mapped to existing curriculum.   This Cash Study covers how EnglishCentral was implemented as part of a general English program at Kyoto Sangyo University. Currently, over 6000 students are using EnglishCentral as part of the English Communication program offered to first and second year students from a variety of faculties. Topics discussed  include:  the reasoning behind the selection of EnglishCentral, initial piloting process, content selection and textbook pairing, student preparation, teacher training, and finally successes and challenges of the overall process.

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New Career English (ESP) Courses Now on EnglishCentral

New Career English (ESP) Courses Now on EnglishCentral

We have launched a series of new Career English (ESP) courses, based on the industry leading series Career Paths, from Express Publishing and several titles from Cambridge University Press.  These special purpose courses are designed for professionals and students in vocational schools and colleges to help them develop the language skills they need to succeed in a professional work situation.

Olympic Sports

This  course is a resource for sport-event support staff who want to improve their English in a work environment. It contains entertaining and educational videos that comprise of work conversations, emails, news and articles related to the Olympics.

Go to course



Information Technology

This course is a resource for information technology professionals who want to improve their English in a work environment. It contains entertaining and educational videos that comprise of work conversations, emails, news and articles related to the computers and IT.

Go to course
Software Engineering

This course is a resource for software engineering professionals who want to improve their English in a work environment. It contains entertaining and educational videos that addresses topics including software development, software testing, the user interface, modeling and career options.

Go to course

Engineering

This  course is a resource for engineering professionals who want to improve their English in a work environment. It contains entertaining and educational videos that comprise of tools, engineering concepts, conversions and career options.

Go to course
Call Center

This course is a resource for call centers professionals who want to improve their English in a work environment. It contains entertaining and educational videos that comprise of work conversations, emails, news and articles related to call centers and customer care.

Go to course
Computer Engineering

This course is a resource for computer engineering professionals who want to improve their English in a work environment. It contains entertaining and educational videos that addresses topics including numbers, computer accessories, hardware, software and operating systems.

Go to course
Navy

This course is a resource for navy professionals who want to improve their English in a work environment. It contains entertaining and educational videos that comprise of work conversations, emails, news and articles related to navigation and marines.

Go to course
Military Command and Control

This  course is a resource for people who are and wish to become military professionals. It contains entertaining and educational videos that addresses topics related to the armed forces.

Go to course
Merchant Navy

This course is a resource for merchant navy professionals who want to improve their English in a work environment. It contains entertaining and educational videos that comprise of work conversations, emails, news and articles related to navigation and marines.

Go to course
Airforce

This course is a resource for air force professionals who want to improve their English in a work environment. It contains entertaining and educational videos that comprise of work conversations, emails, news and articles related to aviation and air armies.

Go to course

There are over 70 Industries covered by the Career Path Series.

Each course contains:

  • Videos.  Interactive Video with bilingual subtitles and clickable in-content definitions.
  • Vocabulary Training.   Students learn vocabulary in-context with fill in the blank activities and vocabulary quizzes.
  • Speaking Practice.  Students practice speaking, getting instant feedback on their pronunciation with EnglishCentral’s IntelliSpeech assessment system.
  • GoLive!.   Students can take 1-1 lessons with a tutor.  Each video lesson in the course comes with a lesson plan (see sample) and with a transcript, featured vocabulary, discussion and comprehension questions.
300 200 EC blogger

VNPT and EnglishCentral Partner in Vietnam

Hanoi, Vietnam  October 11, 2017  – Vietnam Post and Telecommunications Group (VNPT), one of the largest telco providers in Vietnam with more than 80 million mobile subscribers,  today announced the launch of its version of the EnglishCentral Service in Vietnam under the brand “MyEnglish“.

DSC_4653

Mr. Ngo Dien Hy, CEO of VNPT Media, and Alan Schwartz, CEO of EnglishCentral, announce the partnership in Hanoi on October 11, 2017

The launch this year is the 1st phase in the partnership whereby VNPT has become the exclusive provider of the EnglishCentral Service to consumers, schools and businesses in Vietnam.

The new MyEnglish service is targeted first at consumers in Vietnam.  VNPT has a history of building successful multimedia consumer services in Vietnam, including its IPTV service “MyTV“, which quickly became the number one IPTV service in the market with over 1.5 million subscribers.    As with its MyTV service, the new MyEnglish service will use the billing network of VNPT to provide a frictionless payment system for users as well as VNPT Media’s own content delivery network (CDN) to provide high quality and robust video delivery.

As part of the partnership, VNPT also plans to target the school market through its educational subsidiary, VnEdu.  VnEdu is already the #1 education platform provider in Vietnam with over 1500 schools using its learning management system (LMS) called “MyHomework” in Vietnam.

The launch event was attended by 14 journalists and 2 television personalities,  including Khanh Vy, the Headmistress of Newton Middle School, Dr. Le Thi Chinh, Deputy CEO of VNPT-Media, Nguyen Van Tan as well as various news outlets.

DSC_4600

A panel of industry thought leaders, Khanh Vy, EnglishCentral CEO Alan Schwartz, Deputy CEO of VNPT-Media Nguyen Van Tan and Headmistress of Newton Middle School Dr. Le Thi Chinh lead a Q&A with journalists.

The event also featured a panel of key opinion leaders including Khanh Vy, who currently hosts two educational programs on Vietnamese television and YouTube.   She’s a celebrity in Vietnam EdTech space, partly based on her being a polyglot who mastered 7 languages as a college student.  She commented that “the power of the new service is how it makes speaking fun and motivating for learners, while at the same time boosting their confidence with instant feedback. “

DSC_4682

Khanh Vy, an edTech thought leader  in Vietnam, was at the launch event to opine on how it would change the face of English learning in Vietnam

“We are thrilled to be working with the team from VNPT Media”, said Alan Schwartz, Founder & CEO of EnglishCentral.   The team brings some very impressive assets to help build a customer base in Vietnam, including one of the best brands in the market,  deep experience in launching and marketing services in both the consumer and school markets, and considerable technical skill in payment and video delivery.

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The MyEnglish launch team including in the middle, Alan Schwartz, CEO of EnglishCentral, Mr. Ngo Dien Hy, CEO of VNPT Media, and Nguyen Van Tan, Deputy CEO of VNPT-Media

Mr. Ngo Dien Hy, General Director of VNPT-Media commented that “we reviewed many potential solutions for launching our EnglishCentral, and chose EnglishCentral based on its combination of extensive content offering, unique speaking technology and high quality one-to-one live teaching. We believe the seamless integration of these three elements is key to creating a motivating and engaging learning experience for students.”

More coverage for the event in the Vietnamese Press can be found at:

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